Crack, can’t go back

August 19, 2010

“I remember, in the eighties, when crack first hit the scene, hearing all kinds of horror stories about how if you smoked it even once, the memory of its unbelievable high would live on in your system forever, and you would thus never again be able to be content without it. I have no idea if this is true, but I will admit that it scared me off the drug. In the years since, I have sometimes found myself wondering if the same principle applies in other realms–if seeing a particularly astonishing shade of blue, for example, or letting a particularly potent person inside you, could alter you irrevocably, just to have seen or felt it. In which case, how does one know when, or how, to refuse? How to recover?”

-Maggie Nelson’s Bluets.

Write about an experience that has changed you. It can be a story about yourself or a fiction about a character in an experience that has altered them so that they may never go back. It may be an encounter with a lover or an enemy, a place, etc. Positive or not. Attempt to answer questions such as, how does one recognize this change? or Nelson’s “How to recover?”